


losing the game

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Claustrophobia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Panic Attacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-18 21:44:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7331677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s just a rookie, ages away from his family and his home, and he is scrambling for purchase.</p>
            </blockquote>





	losing the game

**Author's Note:**

> this contains spoilers for the events in episode 9 (and mentions previous episodes too) so if you haven't gotten there yet... avoid this for now.

This is a game.

Lance can’t stop shivering and it’s _frustrating_. He’s done all of this before without a single problem and he wants to believe that he can get that back, that if he just concentrates maybe there’s a way some of this makes sense again. But he can’t concentrate and he’s starting to cold-sweat and he feels lost, here, in the darkness. Some part of him, as irrational as it is, is still trying to win the game. That part keeps insisting that this, whatever this is, will blow away, even as his heart is hurtling and begging him to find the doorknob, exit, _escape_.

 

Maybe he messed it up. Lance knows that he does that often enough for it to be a viable conclusion.

He probably messed it up when he sat down with everyone in the middle of the training room and watched Hunk’s eyes light up talking about team bonding and didn’t think, not for a single second, that this could go wrong. He’s had clues, obviously. In the things he knows, the things he avoids, the things he remembers. Lately, he hasn’t been able to run far enough from memories, good or bad. Sometimes it’s hard to even tell between the two. But he remembers soon enough, in nightmares.

Lance doesn’t really want to think about the nightmares.

But Hunk looked so excited and Lance, he’d been playing a long-standing game of avoiding the metaphorical elephant in his head. So he said something sarcastic and Pidge rolled her eyes and then they were all struggling up off of the ground and into the locker rooms for pre-hide and seek showers.

Just. What was he doing? He honestly thought he could go off, and what? Be a fighter pilot? Save the universe in a giant mech? He shouldn’t have tried to be more than he really is. Shouldn’t have tried to do more than he can. He knows his limits. Knows because he was there, hanging onto a piece of the airlock with his feet out below him and his fingers almost _slipped_. Something as minor as the flex of a finger and he was dead, easy, just like that. Without any re-dos, or magitech lions to catch him, without so much as a breath held in because he was too busy yelling for someone’s help.

It makes reality pretty clear.

He’s just a rookie, ages away from his family and his home, and he is scrambling for purchase. Looking for hope in rushed prayers (or whatever he can call those moments now, in his lion, before they take off into space) and at the very least a land-bound death. He doesn’t want to die in space.

That’s the stuff of nightmares.

 

Lance doesn’t know how he managed to convince his body to cooperate but he’s feeling along the walls now, running his fingers along any surface he can find. He knows that’s a bad idea as soon as he caves into it because now, now he realizes just how small the closet is and it brings a new wave of panic through his system. Banging on the door might be possible, whatever small part was so convinced he can pull through has shut up and folded itself away, but he can’t move his hands from a shelf he’s found. They rest there, trembling, and again he’s reminded. Memories. Nightmares. _Shut up_.

What if nobody hears? He’s concerned about it now the same way he was, before, about somebody actually hearing and finding him in here. But if nobody hears, no matter how much he agonizes, that. That hurts enough to keep him stuck in there. He’s been there before. Stuck someplace, unable to ask for help because there’s no help that can _hear_ him. It’s not a good place to be. Almost as bad as screaming for help just because of your own inability.

He wants to laugh but there’s nothing funny. It’s just, that, if he can laugh, or joke around, do something so fundamentally _Lance_ he’ll snap out of it. But when he opens his mouth he can’t manage even that, barely gets something out stronger than a wheeze before he gives up.

 

It was about ten seconds into the game when he managed to get himself into this mess.

Hunk was counting down and Lance’s feet took him down the castle’s halls and into the closet like it was nothing besides routine. Maybe it was, back at the garrison, before he didn’t have much to worry about besides making his bed in the morning and performing well in a fight simulator. He might be undervaluing his time there but god, it feels so basic now, when there’s so much more on the line. When he’s making a fool of himself to an audience the size of the universe.

He can’t breathe in here. It’s what gets him to continue his search along the walls until he finds a panel to pop open the door. The air rushes in, cold and fast, and Lance. He stumbles out and falls onto his hands and steadies himself there on the floor.

It feels a lot like any other night, when he gets up out of bed and stands there in the dark trying to forget what kind of dream he just had.

Takes him a second to feel solid again, instead of like he’s slipping and spilling.

Then he spies Hunk around the corner, and forces himself up. There are alarms running through his head, telling him to hide it. Everything. Put away the shakes and tremors into their respective labeled boxes and pick up life like it hasn’t fundamentally changed in the last ten minutes. Hunk catches his eyes and he hopes his face isn’t red, that his nose isn’t runny, that any sort of physical signal can be guess-worked away as normal. Hunk turns to call back to the others. “Found him!” Then he’s facing him again, and Lance has to force himself to keep making eye contact. “We were looking for you all over, dude.”

Okay. Easy. Put on a smile. No - a grin. Look cocky. Cocky is safe, cocky isn’t suspicious the way uneasy or homesick or falling apart is. “So. Did I win?”

“Did you win? Did you win?” Hunk snorts. “Uh, sure. Now get up, we’re all about to chow down. Believe it or not, I fought very hard to keep the others from eating without you.”

“Right,” Lance says, and he feels like he’s playing another game. Playing pretend as himself. “I’m sure it wouldn’t have been the same without me there.”

“I don’t know.” Pidge is waiting for them at the end of the hall. “We’d have to add more salt to make that work.”

Lance plays affronted. “What are you trying to say?”

“No fighting,” Hunk warns, “Or nobody gets seconds. And I really out-did myself today.”

Pidge shrugs and turns to walk back to the table. Lance hangs behind Hunk a few steps, trying to re-organize himself while the other has his back turned. He wishes they could stop by the bathroom first, just so Lance could check to see how bad he looks but - but he can manage even without that. He’s got jokes and excuses and anecdotes to hide it all under. To bury it in. He looks back behind him on an urge, another impulse, even though he should know better by now -

The door’s still open.

He turns back around.

 

Hunk notices. Maybe no one else has, but he definitely has - he’s sort of got an eye for it. Being with Lance so long, he’s got some kind of sixth sense for it. Well, seventh, if he considers the bond he has with his lion a sixth sense instead.

They used to share everything, like, all the time. Maybe not in words necessarily, but they’d share that space. The kind of space you get from years of co-existing, the space that’s there in the middle of the night when you’re both awake and making small talk (and definitely avoiding something bigger) and even the silence is therapeutic and understood.

He’s not sure that they can do that much anymore. Mostly because there isn’t much open space anymore. Okay, Hunk has to rephrase - the castle is _huge_. Truly gigantic. But ever since it went ham on them because of a corrupted crystal everybody has been sticking to a few main rooms, with the exception of Allura and Coran, who had just spent too much time there (conscious and not) to be tentative for long.

It’s just, quiet alone time? It’s hard to find in a castle full of people who are supposed to be as close as possible, physically and mentally, in case of an emergency. But Hunk can tell that Lance needs that space again. He’d seen little cues before, like Lance taking a second longer than everyone else to get his lion out, or Lance avoiding the medical pod for any sort of injury (he’d laugh it away saying that he just preferred traditional animal pattern band-aids). More than the presence of something, though, Hunk noticed the lack - Lance’s smile had less energy, his laughter less easy-boned conviction.

He takes it upon himself to meet Lance halfway there. Any more and he’d probably scare him off. Hunk saw the way Lance looked as they finished up their game a few days before - there was so much _missing_. Hunk won't contribute to that if he can help it.

So he sits down at the dining table with a bowl of reimagined plantain chips and waits. It’s nighttime, and Pidge is the only other person really out and about - Keith’s holed away in his room, same with Allura and Coran, and Shiro is running some drills in the training room. Lance is probably asleep already. But like Hunk said, he has that seventh sense. It’s telling him to be patient.

Back at the garrison, Lance would get homesick. Hunk’s seen flashes of it here, but back on land, it was a little less desperate and a little fuller. The sort of homesickness you feel bad about because you know ultimately that it’s useless, that give it five weeks and you’ll be visiting home again. Hunk would rub his back and watch Lance go through the little care packages that his family sent along at the beginning of every month. He liked using it sparingly, not only to make it last the whole month, but also to save it for rainy days when he was feeling especially bad. Rainy days meant spa days for their dorm - the three of them decked out in mud masks and bubbling cleansers and sometimes even little foam stubs to keep their toes apart on the event of a pedicure. Lance knows how to turn bad things good.

That’s sort of how the two of them became paladins of Voltron, too.

But deep-space changes that for people.

 

It’s when Lance steps down into the dining room that Hunk gets the chance to put things back in place. They stare at each other for a beat, during which Hunk is sure that Lance is considering retreat, but he must be too tired and too wary of falling asleep again because he sits down beside Hunk and steals a plantain chip. Doesn’t saying anything, just turns his head to where light from Pidge’s laptop is traveling down into their room and watches as it changes colors and intensity. Hunk decides to do the same, taking a handful of chips into his palm and eating them one at a time.

“Can’t sleep?” Lance doesn’t turn around as he says it.

“No. You know, just a night owl.”

Lance hums at that. “ _Chicharritas_.”

“What?”

“That’s what we call these. Back home.” His voice wobbles a bit on the last word. “My sisters used to fight me all the time because I’d steal the entire bowl for myself.”

“And?”

“And I let them win, obviously. Nobody can beat me.”

Hunk doesn’t point out how uncertain he sounds. Instead he scoots the bowl closer to Lance and pats him on the back. Not quite the back rub of yesteryear, but. It had to be close enough.

“Only I can beat me, Hunk. You know?” Lance is crying, right into his salty fingers and he’s still turned away from Hunk, still turned towards those lights.

“I don’t think I know,” he says in return, and Lance swivels to look at him, almost knocks the bowl off the table. “But I can guess, dude. I can guess.”

Lance nods, wiping his eyes with the sides of his hands. “I miss how things were before.”

“That,” Hunk says. “That is something I think I know pretty well.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!
> 
> i was thinking about lance and the things he'd been through so far in the show (that usually is reduced to a joke...) and i thought why not.. this.
> 
> also i'm not cuban and i was trying to find the word for plantain chips they use there so if i'm wrong let me know i will correct it inmediatamente!!
> 
> edit: my friend [tinyeuphemism](http://tinyeuphemism.tumblr.com/) drew some art of this fic! please check it out it was so nice of them! [[link](http://tinyeuphemism.tumblr.com/post/147501581008/i-forgot-tumblr-does-resizing-thingies-but-ive)]


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